[Haskell-cafe] Re: 1,000 packages, so let's build a few!

[John Goerzen]

Neil Mitchell wrote:

> * Part of it comes down to most developers not being Windows people.

That certainly describes me.  I find the platform annoying and stressful
(all the worries about security).

But another issue is: it's proprietary and expensive.

The base OS isn't cheap, and doesn't even come with development tools.
While GHC and friends do run on Windows for free, if you are trying to
deal certain things (Windows GUIs, ODBC, etc.) it is difficult at best
without shelling out the really big bucks for the Microsoft development
environment.

Having said that, I agree that good Windows support is a worthwhile goal
for the community, and I very much appreciate patches and bug reports
from Windows users.  However, I am in somewhat of a difficult position
when it comes to turning the latter into actual patches.

Of course, MacOS X is also proprietary and expensive.  But it has at
least a bastardized POSIX core, and as such seems to never really need
much porting from my Linux development environment.  At least until Mac
users start demanding resource fork and finder info support.  ;-)

-- John